Monday, October 17, 2005

I'm back ....and the technology gods hate me!!!!

I'm sure you all thought that I was recovering from a gigantis hangover after the 2 big-ass martini night on Friday; however, it wasn't that. Instead....my internet was down!!!! Horror off all horrors!!! How did I ever live without 24 hour/day live connection to the rest of the world??

Anyway...problem solved and fixed and back in action..... So here is the weekend update:

Saturday: Grading, grading, and more grading. This trauma along with no internet service led to Sunday, which turned into a completely wasted day--I spent hours reading fiction, playing video games, and talking on the phone (had to get my words in somehow, if not by typing). All in all, not a bad weekend.

Today the technology gods were frowning upon me again! I show up to teach my class and the projector is not working--20 minutes later a techie has that up and running and I'm off (after talking through the first few slides of my powerpoint without visual backup). Then I get to a part of the lecture where I want to demostrate how to do something and I try to open the necessary software program and get some weird message about being an unauthorized user (funny since I used that very program 10 minutes before class in my office). So I talk around that glitch as well and decide to let my class out 30 minutes early in order for them to go to the computer lab and work through the "how to" project with my assistence in the lab. We move to the lab, everyone logs on and then try to open the program and only one student can successfully open the program and accompanying file--all others receive a variety of error messages (oddly enough, they all receive different messages for trying to do the same task). Lab assistant is ready to poke out his eyeballs and cannot solve the problem and is on the phone with the "power techies". At this point, I give up and send my students home as there is only 15 minutes left in the period and no sign of a solution on the horizon. So, in sum, I gave up a treasured 30 minutes of classtime I could have used finishing up other things in the classroom and I had to alter the homework assignment as students were unable to access the materials necessary.